Icelandic Road Trip – Challenging hike to reach Hengifoss waterfall

With another very long day of driving ahead of us, we decided to get up quite early to be able to make a few stops on our way to lake Mývatn.

From Road 96, we took Road 92 towards Egilsstadir and joined road 1 near the banks of Lagarfljot River. The river extends from the bridge in Egilsstadir to the lake Logurinn. A tale says that a large serpent swims around in the Logurinn Lake. It has even been caught on tape. We haven’t seen it, just in case you are wondering 😉

We took road 931/933 towards Lítlanesfoss & Hengifoss waterfall, one of the highest waterfall in Iceland. The top of Hengifoss is about 450 above the sea level. The first waterfall, Litlanesfoss, with its surrounding basalt columns, is at 2 km from the car park. The hike seems short but it is quite steep ! It was very cold and the weather was not fantastic. We continued for another 2 km to reach Hengifoss. The red patterns on the cliffs are quite impressive and it’s something we don’t typically see in other waterfalls. The red stripes are layers of red clay sandwiched between layers of basalt. When the lava flowed over the acidic soil, the iron reacted with oxygen, resulting in reddish colours in the intermediate layers… the informative signs were …very informative ! 🙂

We had lunch at the Vatnajökull National Park visitor center, it was really too cold to eat outside !! Then we started our very long road to lake Mývatn. We came across a very beautiful waterfall on the side of the road, some sheep and drove through an immense lava field. It was very desolated !